Crime and Punishment Themes

As you might have guessed from the title, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is obsessed with crime, criminality, and vice. Like many of the best books, it asks more questions than it answers...

Crime and Punishment is very interested in the idea of "judgment" – judgment of self, of others, judgment of and by society, and judgment of and by religion. The novel asks us to judge not on...

Since violence and criminality dominate much of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, we often have to peel back layers of text to get to the love. Most of the novel's "romantic" relationships...

You could say that Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is a book about an ex-student turned murderer who wanders around St. Petersburg, Russia trying to save children and young women from bad...

Dreams and hallucinations, as well as questions of madness, sanity, and existence are huge parts of Crime and Punishment. The novel is deeply psychological and most of us can relate to at least som...

We dare you to find a chapter in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment without some form of the word "suffer" in it, or without some person (or animal) suffering terrible physical and/or psychol...

We get some grim visions of "home" in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Often, the home is a site of violence, abuse, and extreme poverty, a trap that seems impossible to escape. Eviction a...

There's plenty of alcohol in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and it isn't romanticized or celebrated in any way. In this novel, alcohol is nearly always a symbol or symptom of weakness, a...

We never see the outside of a school, much less the inside of one, in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Yet, we would argue that this is a "college book" because two of its main character's...

As novelist and critic A.N. Wilson says, "[Fyodor Dostoevsky's] views on religion are notoriously hard to pin down with confidence" (source). Hearing this is bit of a relief, isn't it? Some version...